Well…she did, actually. Tiger was clearly enthralled with entering his science fair, and Sheila had just as clearly abdicated her responsibility in this area. Susan desperately wanted to find her own private little niche to share with Tiger. She knew nothing about ten-year-old boys. In the back of her mind, she’d figured on doses of love and gin rummy, and doses of love and his room, and doses of love and maybe checkers-but not bugs. Or having to force one disgusted little boy through two tedious hours of shopping. At least he was interested in the bugs-she’d have to take her chance where she found it.
She was heating a pot of water for coffee when the first margarine container arrived, via one small filthy hand. “Can you believe it? A stinkbug!” Tiger caroled enthusiastically.
“Aaah.”
How nice. She added two spoonfuls of instant coffee to her cup, and watched warily as the plastic container suddenly jumped a half inch off the counter. Clearly, the thing was alive. And she was the one who had volunteered to kill and pin it. Perhaps the coffee would fortify her.
With her chin cupped in her hands, Susan watched an incredibly rapid progression of insects arrive. Who would have thought that collecting them would be so easy? The backyard looked spotless. Clean, well kept. Yet in came long-horned beetles, short-horned beetles, crickets, grasshoppers, a lacewing, a stone fly and Tiger’s favorite, an assassin fly…
Assassin. Her job. By the time Susan had finished her coffee, she’d unearthed a square of plywood from the basement and meticulously printed out fifteen labels, all neatly attached to the board now. The opposite counter was a circus act of jumping margarine tubs. She was feeling distinctly sick to her stomach.
The back door flew open yet again, this time propelled by a much larger hand than Tiger’s. Susan lurched instantly to her feet. “How’s it going?” she asked cheerfully.
Griff watched her busily transferring all the bug containers to the kitchen table. Such busy-busy movements for his normally graceful Susan… His eyes swept over her supple lines in the soft mauve shirtwaist. Those butter-soft eyes were fluttering away from him, hands nervously rearranging her hair and her collar-in between trips back and forth to collect the bug containers.
He cleared his throat, setting yet another one on the table. “A bumblebee. God knows what one was doing in the yard this late in the season.”
“We needed a bee,” she said gravely. “I can’t tell you how worried I was that we weren’t going to have a bee.”
The chuckle came from deep in his throat, just before his hands snatched her up and swung her close to him. She smelled delicious. Susan always smelled delicious. At the moment, a wee bit like coffee and felt-marker ink, but beneath that he could easily detect the faint scent of the perfume she wore, and the undeniable Susan-fragrance of soft skin beneath that. His lips snuggled in at the side of her neck, just for one small bite-
Susan nipped back, wound her arms around his waist and looked up at him. “I want to talk to you.”
“So talk.” Communication was terribly important in a marriage. His hands swept down the supple slope of her back to her waist, communicating terribly important things. Delicate color rose in her cheeks, delighting him. She was getting all the right messages. Tiger could do his own damn bug collecting.
“About hamsters.”
He drew back, eyebrows arched. “Hamsters?”
“Tiger wants one so badly, and Sheila doesn’t want to be bothered.”
“One of the few things in life I agree with my ex-wife on.”
“Hmm.” Her fingers chased up a wandering trail until both her arms were loosely hooked around his neck. He smelled as fresh as the autumn breeze outside, all woodsy and male. “It would be something he could have here. Special for him. That his mother couldn’t possibly resent. And if it’s so important to him…”
“Darling.” He pressed his forehead to hers. “Hamsters smell like the pits, are a great deal of work and mess with little return-and my son, hard though this may be for you to believe, will survive without one. Now a dog-”
“Would be nice. But he wants a hamster.”
“Have you ever had a hamster?”
She shook her head. “Cats and fish.”
“We’ll get a cat, then. You’ve already got the fish.”
He extricated himself from her reluctantly, seeing Tiger approaching from the window over the sink. His son inevitably came through a door as if he lived in constant fear that the knob wouldn’t work. The effort was usually a crash-through, as noisy and clumsy as possible. Tiger’s brilliant smile inevitably made up for that.
“Can you believe it? I’ve got three more. How many we got now, Susan?”
Susan viewed the table impassively. “Thirteen.”
“Well, come on, Dad, we’re nearly done.”
Griff’s sigh reverberated through the kitchen as he turned and followed his son. “Susan?”
She looked up from dolefully regarding the collection. Her smile, by contrast, was remarkably brilliant. “I was just about to start killing them,” she said happily.
“Susan-”
“You just go right ahead.”
“A drop of alcohol. It’s a quick, painless death,” Griff said wryly. “And if it’s really bothering you-”
“Of course it isn’t!” she said indignantly. What did he think she was, some kind of sissy?
“And Susan, no hamsters.”
“Hmm.”
They didn’t seem to have any rubbing alcohol. Vaguely, Susan remembered throwing out half a bottle when she’d packed up the things from her apartment, but no amount of poking through the medicine cabinets revealed one now. Glancing out the window, she saw Griff in the far corner of the yard, laughing at something Tiger said, and guiltily pulled his bottle of Chivas Regal off the top shelf of the kitchen cupboard.
It
A dreadful acrid smell assailed her. The stinkbug. She’d thought Tiger was joking. She jammed that lid on again and checked out the grasshopper, who looked distinctly innocent, harmless and deserving of life.
She jammed that lid on, too, and checked the fly again. Murmuring a short eulogy, she gingerly lifted the tiny corpse with tweezers, transferred it to the mounting board, jabbed it with a pin and swallowed hard against her revulsion. This was ridiculous. They were only bugs, dammit. She was no shrinking violet, and had certainly swatted her share of mosquitoes every summer.
All too soon, Tiger would probably be bringing home snakes. This was nothing. So where was her sense of humor?
But Susan knew what was really bothering her, and it wasn’t the bugs. A few painful realities were stabbing at her consciousness. Feelings of inadequacy haunted her. Whatever had made her think she was equipped to deal with a ten-year-old boy who had dropped into her life out of the blue? She knew nothing of his interests, so why had she blithely assumed she could easily occupy a special little niche in his life? Yet that’s what she wanted, not to be a mother to him, but to be someone who was special in another way, someone who really cared, someone he could grow to count on…
She already loved Tiger, but this was their first one-to-one encounter, and she really
Chapter 4
